twddn

Joined July 2022

36 stories

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A man who likes to preach
I still don't know why Sally and I bothered to go to that party on a forested slope outside Aspen. The people at the party were old and surprisingly boring, so much so that we, in our 40s, were the "young ladies" of the event. The house is nice -- if you like a Ralph Laurentian log cabin -- a sturdy, luxurious one 9,000 feet above sea level, complete with elk antlers, Kilim floral blankets and a wood-burning stove. Just as we were about to leave, the host said, "No, just wait a minute. We can talk." He was a strong man who made a lot of money.
By twddn3 years ago in Humans
To lose innocence is to lose the weapon against reality
Early in the morning, her old aunt carried her armchair out onto the balcony toward the sugar cane Field, as she did every time she woke up with the idea of making dolls. She used to swim in the river when she was young. One day, she was in the water when the river swelled with heavy rain and threw up a dragon-tail of water. She suddenly felt the fluffy snow in her marrow. Her head was buried in the dark echo of the stones, and she thought that over the sound of the water she heard the sound of the rolling waves hitting the saltpeter on the sand, and for a moment she thought that her hair had finally reached the sea. It was also at that moment that she felt something terrible bite her calf. People shouted and pulled her to shore, where she writhed in pain on a stretcher and was carried home.
By twddn3 years ago in Psyche
Love is the only thing that matters
Cancer, like pregnancy, starts out invisible to you or your loved one, then suddenly becomes invisible and visible. You'll notice a woman wearing a hijab walking on a treadmill at the gym instead of running. You will see an empty seat appear in your child's classroom, and the teachers will whisper and weep. Cancer is like pollen in the air in spring. We all breathe in this air, but only the wind can control where the pollen goes. And no matter how hard we try, cancer always wins. Half of us will develop cancer. Every two minutes, someone in the UK is diagnosed with cancer. It affects all of us.
By twddn3 years ago in Longevity
The world has changed, but we cannot grasp it
It all started early one morning when Mr. B dragged himself out of bed and strolled slowly to the bathroom. He had not been sleeping well lately, and he had been waking up at night, and the long nights were broken up into tiny pieces like his late wife's beads, which he had found in a drawer long ago. He took the string in his hand. The rotten string broke, and the colored beads fell all over the floor. Most of the beads are missing. From then on, during sleepless nights, he often wondered where those round, thoughtless little beings had gone. In what pile of dust did they make their home? Which floor crevice has become their living space?
By twddn3 years ago in Fiction
Where the psycho killer came from
On a cold winter morning in early December, Ballard descended from the mountains onto frog Hill Highway with a pair of squirrels slung from his belt. He looked back at the bend in the road and saw a car standing there, its engine humming softly, blue smoke spiraling up into the cold morning light. Ballard crossed the road, dropped to his stomach in the grass, crawled through the trees, and came to the top of the bend in the pass. The car was still idling over there, and there was no one in sight.
By twddn3 years ago in Criminal
Women are only taught to defuse bombs thrown at them
My new home was a small yellow room in a dark green house that I shared with an illustrator and an oil painter. It used to be occupied by a dancer who was going away for the summer and sublet her bed to me. The house, which rents for $400 a month on the west side of Providence, has a big backyard and a cat named Elvis. The dancer left me a pillow, clean sheets, soft gauze blankets, and little whitebait fish in the drawer. The morning after I arrived, I momentarily forgot where I was. I panicked until I saw the cream-colored walls of the house and leaves pressing against the Windows. Nobody's home. I looked around. The kitchen has a black and white tile floor and giant jungle paintings. There were freshly picked tomatoes and carrots, their threaded roots caked with mud. A wooden shelf filled with spices, a hard honey pot, a green kettle, a crocodile statue. I followed a string of lights past a dark blue sofa, a mustard corduroy chair. A newspaper lay unfurled beside a half-done crossword puzzle, a small landscape painting and peach-colored yarn. I already have a crush on my two roommates who are not home.
By twddn3 years ago in Humans
We always want to test our normalcy by someone else's love
That morning, after the scholarship results were announced, he and Marianne were sworn in together. She had been out the night before and looked a bit hungover, which pleased him a bit because the ceremony was so formal, they had to wear robes and recite Latin. After that, they went to a coffee shop near the school to have breakfast. They sat at a table on the street outside the store as passers-by carried paper shopping bags and talked loudly on their phones. Marianne drank a cup of black coffee and ordered a croissant, which she didn't finish. Cornell ordered a large ham and cheese omelet with two slices of buttered toast and milk for tea.
By twddn3 years ago in Humans
The most luxurious thing these days is probably sleep
Human life has, by and large, been locked into a state of ceaseless continuity, the norm of which is perpetual motion. In this state, time no longer passes, outside clock time. Behind the empty buzzword, 24/7 marks a kind of static redundancy that denies connection to the rhythms and cycles of human life. It is meant to be an arbitrary uninflected schema, cut from complex, varied or precipitated experience. "24/365," for example, is completely different, because it implies a dull, undulating timeliness in which real change and the unexpected may occur. Many institutions in the developed world have been operating on a 24/7 basis for decades. It is only in recent years that our personal and social identities have been reshaped and reshaped to accommodate the constant workings of markets, information networks and other systems. The 24/7 environment dresses up as a social world, but it's really a typical machine world, a life stop that doesn't let the world know how much it costs to keep it functioning effectively. It must be distinguished from time as discussed by early 20th-century thinkers like Lukacs, the hollow, homogenous modernity of time in the form of measures or calendars that serve the functioning of the state, finance and industry, to the exclusion of individual hopes or plans. What is new is that this pretence is completely abandoned, that time is no longer tied to any long-term undertakings, and that even the illusion of "progress" or development is broken down. The 24/7 world, illuminated by day and night and removed from shadow, is the last illusion of post-capitalist history, with the otherness removed as the driving force of historical development.
By twddn3 years ago in Psyche
To feed oneself alone is not to live
It was a June afternoon, the day before my daughter's first birthday. I sat on the shelter's battered love couch with an old digital camera to capture her first steps. Mia was trying to curl her toes and keep her balance. She had curly hair and a pinstriped one-piece, but her brown eyes were determined. Through the lens, I could clearly see the creases of her ankles, her fleshy thighs, and her chubby belly. She came prattering toward me, her bare feet on the tile floor. Years of grime were deeply embedded in the cracks in the ground. I tried my best to scrub, but I couldn't clean it.
By twddn3 years ago in Psyche
He spent his life fighting the powerful
We didn't drive over the bridge. This surprised me. I remember thinking we would see the spire of the Pan Am building piercing the fog, or the bay shining in the distance. However, on my first visit to San Francisco in the 1980s, we took the tunnel. The Bay Area Rapid Transit train from Berkeley spat us right into the loud reverberations of the downtown business district.
By twddn3 years ago in Lifehack
At first I thought she wanted love and then I found she wanted freedom
For millions of years before Kenya was called Kenya, the name belonged to the greatest mountain there. Our farm is in Njoro, and you can see it standing on the farm. The mountain is in the British Territory of East Africa, and the far end of the ridge is sharply demarcated into golden grasslands. On the top of the mountain is the snow that does not melt all the year round, just like wearing the snow and ice crown to the mountain. Behind our farm is the Mau Forest, which is shrouded in a blue mist. In front of the farm, Longgai Gorge slopes down and widens until it joins the Menangai crater, known locally as the "sacred Mountain". On the other side of the farm are the Aberdare Mountains, surrounded by blue-grey hills. At dusk, purple smoke hung over the hills, which grew shadowy and faded into the night.
By twddn3 years ago in Humans
She was certainly a pioneer in the awakening of marriage
Kate Chopin was born in 1850 in St. Louis, Missouri. At that time, the United States, less than a century old, was still expanding its territory, and the use of black slaves to grow cotton and other crops was still an important economic form in most states. Eleven years later, the Civil War broke out in the name of the abolition of slavery. It was still a frontier, accumulating and growing country, far from becoming a world power, and one important sign was that America had not yet established a great literary tradition. Emerson, Whitman, And Mark Twain have all appeared, but for many readers and writers, it is European literature that represents the highest standards of literature.
By twddn3 years ago in Marriage